If they only knew ......

[vermontboy]

Unlike "history", old magazines give us a look into what people were thinking in the past. Read the following and try to guess the year it was written - answer is at the end..

 

" Owners who view with dismay the jumbled mass of machinery under the hoods of their modern cars may like to know that they are not alone. A recent survey by Automotive News among local service stations and garages finds operators and mechanics in low spirits over the difficulty of getting at and fixing various units on the newer cars."

 

It went on to comment on the lack of accessibility for things (including crankcase drains), the large number of specialty tools required to service modern vehicles, and the amount of "gadgetry" (windshield washers, power steering pumps, etc) crammed under the hoods of modern vehicles.

 

From Consumer Reports - April 1954

[Harold]

I'm from April, 1954 too!

[Rusty_OToole]

Doesn't surprise me. Some of the most expensive cars of the fifties seemed to have been designed to be impossible to service or repair. Lincoln was the worst. But, you could still buy cheap cars with simple motors and lots of room under the hood. Not any more.

[wayne sheldon]

Until the parenthesis " (windshield washers, power steering pumps, etc) ", I would have guessed it could have been published about 1905. Years ago, while researching some early automobile magazines, I found an article published about 1908 that predicted the end of gasoline to be before 1918. They had calculated the the growth of demand with the increasing popularity of the gasoline powered automobile would exhaust the world's known oil reserves long before 1920. I have read other similar articles from that era. Not much has really changed in a hundred years.

[lump]

LOL.

• I remember being a mechanic trainee in the very early 1970's, and being horrified at what all we had to go through to change the spark plugs on a 1969 Firebird with a 400 V8 and air conditioning. I seem to recall the mechanics made holes in the right side inner fender, and put through a long extension with socket to reach them through the fender well.
• I recall being told that to change the tail light bulb in an early 1970 Monte Carlo, you had to remove the rear bumper...(though I never experienced that one myself). 
• My sister-in-law owned a Chevy Monza notchback car with factory V8 engine. One spark plug was nearly impossible to remove. I finally took a middle-deep 13/16 socket and cut a hex onto the outside of it, and bored a round hole through the square hole for the 3/8 drive, which the spark plug would fit through. Then I slid it over the plug body, and could now reach the hex on the outside of the socket with a wrench. (Essentially, I used that socket as an extension for the hex on the spark plug, to bring it out where I could reach it.) 
• I once owned a 1933 Adler Trumpf Jr; a German sports car. It was front wheel drive, with 4-speed column-shifted transmission. Basically, the Adler engineers had taken a rear wheel drive car, and turned the drive train around backwards, eliminating the drive shaft, and putting the differential under the radiator. The fan belt was driven by a pulley on the clutch assembly. So to change the fan belt, the entire car would have to be split in half! 

[Joe in Canada]

I had a Cadillac Allante for one year. Very nice car BUT the engine spring a coolant leak. Changed the two external coolant tubes that had rotted at the hose connections that turned into the end of a love affair. A good friend has a large shop that they do diesel engine re & rebuild and lets me use a hoist when not in use. It sat out front for a couple of days waiting for a spot to change a brake line. A customer had seen it sitting for a few days then enquired and it was sold. This is one car I can never see an automotive enthusiast doing a ground up restoration and destined for the bailer.

Edited March 31, 2017 by Joe in Canada (see edit history)

[Larry Schramm]

Try to change the head bolts when they break on a more current Ford truck.  To take the head bolts out and remove the heads you need to remove the truck / cab body.  I saw one being done.  Could not believe it.

Edited April 1, 2017 by Larry Schramm (see edit history)

[padgett]

Beg to differ. On my Sunbird V8 it was very easy to drop the two engine mount bolts on the drivers side from underneath and jack in two stages for the two rear driver's plugs. And since it tended to use a bit of oil, this was needed often.

 

And then there was the Sunbeam Tiger. There were removable panels under the dash for the rear plugs.

[auburnseeker]

11 hours ago, Larry Schramm said:

Try to change the head bolts when they break on a more current Ford truck.  To take the head bolts out and remove the heads you need to remove the truck / cab body.  I saw one being done.  Could not believe it.

I had it done on my 06 Diesel.  4500 from a friend and that was after I had already spent almost 3 days doing the EGR delete as I originally thought the EGR cooler had failed.  That's a near impossible job with the cab in place,  especially trying to get the exhaust connected back up. 

Actually he said the cab only takes about 2 and 1/2 hours to remove.  It would be worth it if you were just doing the Delete.  

Once that's done and you replace everything with APR studs,  you have a really good engine.   

Leave it up to a genius to decide to use torque to yield bolts and then use as few as possible to hold the heads on a diesel engine.